Criticism – A Motley Vision

How I wrote When Home Isn’t Heaven on Earth in Mormon Literature

If you haven’t yet read the Building Zion issue of Irreantum edited by Natalie Brown, you should.

And not just because it features my essay “When Home Isn’t Heaven on Earth in Mormon Literature.”

By the way: if you are one of those folks living in Utah who use Google Fiber and can’t access it (as of this post, we’re still working on fixing that), here’s a link to a PDF version of my essay:

when home isn’t heaven on earth in mormon literature (PDF)

When Natalie announced the call for submissions earlier in the year, I knew I had to submit something. But I wasn’t sure what.

The most obvious route would be a short story.

But I’d been wanting to return to literary criticism and so found myself thinking about homes in Mormon literature.

I had an inkling there was something important there but wasn’t sure what until I read Donald Marshall’s “The Week-End” in his story collection The Rummage Sale and was struck by how the main character’s home was described. This led to the following notes (in a text file–all notes and writing begin in text files for me):

Tracy memoir
Angel Falling Softly scene with vampire in home
The Weekend Donald Marshall
Bound on Earth ????

Bound on Earth is the lovely novel in stories by Angela Hallstrom. One of the finest works of faithful realism of the 21st century.

Angel Falling Softly is a not well known Mormon vampire (or more Mormon meets vampire) novel by Eugene Woodbury. Published by Zarahemla Books not too long after the Twilight series came out, it does things with the vampire mythos and Mormonism that are strange and heretical and yet also mundane and ultimately orthodoxically Mormon. In some ways, it’s much more in dialogue with Bound on Earth than Twilight.

The Tracy memoir is, of course, The Burning Point by Tracy McKay. It’s one of the works of recent-ish Mormon literature that I’ve though about the most over the past couple of years. In particular, I’ve been thinking about how one of the reviews of it said something about how the the third person interludes in it didn’t really work. I’m not entirely sure why, but that judgment has gnawed at me since I read it. I suppose because to me it felt like those interludes were doing something important even if I couldn’t quite articulate what that was.

The next set of notes were these:

Reference?
Love at HOme, home as temple, home as sacred,
The World – Danny Mark Fisher on the uncanny
Chicago book on the home as domain – nuclear family

The World refers to Danny Nelson’s short story in Monsters & Mormons by that title. The Mark Fisher book is The Weird & the Eerie. The Chicago book is Families against the City: Middle Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, 1872-1890. Both are fascinating works that could be put in fruitful dialogue with Mormon topics, but didn’t make it into my essay due to space/scope considerations.

I wasn’t sure I had something there. But I re-read portions of Angel Fallling Softly and Bound on Earth, and it all began to add up. Specifically, the descriptions of Mormon homes as sites of the uncanny or weird were oddly parallel or resonant in the works I had put together even as unlikely as a set of works as they are.

This, by the way, is what makes the study of Mormon literature interesting and challenging for a critic: Mormon literature as a field brings in all types of narrative art in many types of genre that were written and published under a whole variety of circumstances.

It also may be why not only is there not very much Mormon literary criticism, but often it’s focused on an individual work or author or genre. Worthwhile work. But my background is comparative literature, and I can’t help but have a magpie approach.

The next step was to transcribe all of the passages were relevant to the framework. That process did more than anything else to help the essay come together. It validated (to me, at least) the approach I was taking.

At the same time, I worried that The Burning Point wasn’t quite going to fit, especially my point about the interludes. And I was worried that the essay was going to be too long because I knew I’d need to do quite a bit of summarizing and quoting, partly because that was the nature of the project, and partly because I knew the audience couldn’t be expected to have read all five of the works I was going to include.

In fact, if you have read all five, let me know in the comments or at me on Twitter.

The first draft came in at 5,952 words.

The introduction was too indulgent (I went heavy into the gnomic mode that comes much too naturally to me); some of the summarizations were awkward; and the ending wasn’t quite all the way there.

But to my surprise and delight, the conclusion was very different from what I had thought it would be – the interludes in The Burning Point had turned out to be critical to a larger point and a bridge between the memoir and the fictional works as well as to the field as a whole.

And then I didn’t touch it for two weeks, maybe three. Not for the valid writerly reason of wanting to build some distance, but because I wasn’t sure it worked. It was all summarization and not enough analysis.

But as the deadline for the special issue approached, I decided I should at least give it a shot. And I discovered that what was wrong is that I kept trying to say too much and provide too much context. There are forms of literary criticism that need to do that. That need to be boiled down and condensed more. But that’s wasn’t what I was actually trying to do.

The summarization was the analysis.

That is, the way in which the portions of the text that describe when homes don’t feel like heaven on earth are woven into how I tell the story of the individual works provides a reading that, hopefully, brings something to the audience.

To put it another way, hopefully it makes The World seem a little less like a satire and the first chapter of Bound on Earth feel a little more strange.

I spent (parts of) two days revising the essay.

The second draft ended up longer – 6,138 words.

But they were better words. Everything fit together mpre solidly and smoothly. I submitted it and was delighted that Natalie accepted it.

In the editing stage with Irreantum, I fixed some textual infelicities in the sections on The World and The Week-End along with a few other minor wording changes.

I know that the essay is a little rough, a little weird. I could have done a lot more to build the critical framework. It relies way too much on the reader being able to decode and contextualize the assertions I make in the introduction.

But hey: I’m writing Mormon criticism again.

I’m thinking of writing more of it in 2022. And doing so in email newsletter form (but one that happens in seasons/limited runs). If you want in on that (should that happen), click the button below to subscribe.

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On the Problem and Promise of Alex Caldiero’s Sonosophy

In January of 2011, I shared my dissertation proposal on Alex Caldiero’s sonosophy and my comprehensive Ph.D. exam lists with the AMV community. I passed my comps in early June 2012 and defended my dissertation the first day of May this year. I won’t lie: while I’ve been changed as a person and a scholar by engaging Caldiero’s work, it’s been nice to have the weight of grad school off my shoulders and to be able to relax again, although now I’ve got a handful of other writing projects and a teaching position to occupy my mind. One of those projects is revising my dissertation into a book, something I’ve become more amenable to the further I get from my dissertation defense, preparations for which amped my nerves up so high that it took a few weeks to settle myself.

To the end of sharing my work with and seeking feedback on my work from interested parties in the MoLit community, I’m posting an excerpt from my dissertation here. The excerpt (see the end of the post) includes the acknowledgements, the abstract, and the ForeWord. If, for whatever reason, you’re interested in reading the entire dissertation (all ~350 pages of it), shoot me an email at tawhiao [at] gmail [dot] com.

Here’s the abstract to (I hope) pique your interest in my discussion of the problem and promise of sonosophy:

Continue reading “On the Problem and Promise of Alex Caldiero’s Sonosophy”

“An Open Palm and a Consecrated Life”

When I don’t have other things occupying my mind (and often when I do), I think a lot about language and kinship, about the potential of words to forge new relationships among people and between people and things and thereby to shape new neural, emotional, physical, and social worlds. Because I believe that language has this cosmoplastic capacity, I’m convinced that it has the potential—more than violence and threats of violence—to lead us to better, more sustainable versions of ourselves as individuals, as communities, as nations, and as a species.

In light of Sunday’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, I needed to remind myself of my convictions, which inform my writing and my teaching; so, egoist that I am, I turned to an essay I had published on the topic in Sunstone last year: “‘An Open Palm and a Consecrated Life’: Three Meditations on Being-with Others.” The essay explores the implications of a question Adam Miller asks in Letters to a Young Mormon: “The question is, will we greet [the] passing [of everything and everyone we know] with a closed fist or with an open palm and a consecrated life” (75)? My response to Miller grapples with the ethics of state-sponsored violence, lyrics from Emma Lou Thayne, and Enoch’s vision of a God who weeps over human violence.

Here it is. Take my words however you will.

https://app.box.com/embed/s/oewmdtv49p7lmm24h9yv3kv2e8c3e2kd

Sundry Moldy Solecisms # 3 Mahonri Stewart, A Roof Overhead

Title: A Roof Overhead and Other Plays
Author: Mahonri Stewart
Publisher: Zarahemla Books
Genre: Plays
Year Published: 2016
Number of Pages: 390
Binding: Paper
ISBN13: 978-0-9883233-7-7
Price: $17.95

The summer after my junior year in high school, or maybe the year after, I saw an audition notice for a BYU graduate student production, The Persecution and Crucifiction of Jesus: Four Plays from the Wakefield Mystery Cycle.

Our director, Rodger, explained how mystery plays were performed by medieval guilds, so we would be playing both medieval guildsmen and the characters they were playing. And since the plays were travelling shows, Rodger built a pageant wagon for the set and planned to perform at the University Mall.

He decided later that the sacred character of the plays didn’t lend itself to audiences wandering in and out as they would at a mall, so we set up the pageant wagon and the audience seating on the Pardoe Theater stage, close enough to see the audience jump when the Roman soldiers were pounding the nails into Jesus’s hands. (There was a washer in his palm that the end of the wooden nail fit into, so there was no damage, but what the audience could imagine.)

Then they raised up the cross and dropped it into a hole at the back of the pageant wagon. (Audience gasps.) My character was the one who took Jesus down, draping a long cloth around his waist and up over the arms of the cross to hold him in place so the others could undo the ropes holding his arms and legs to the cross. Then we would lower him down into the arms of Mary and the burial party. Of course, Rodger cautioned us to be very careful not to drop him, as the actor would have no way to break his fall, but would surely break his legs.

Continue reading “Sundry Moldy Solecisms # 3 Mahonri Stewart, A Roof Overhead”

On Sheldon Lawrence’s Hearts of the Fathers and Categories of Relgious Fiction (with a most inappropriate comparison)

I had the pleasure of reading Sheldon Lawrence’s book Hearts of the Fathers a couple of weeks ago. Dr. Lawrence is a professor at BYU-Idaho, and when I requested to review an advance copy, he had it delivered to my husband, who also works at BYU-Idaho. When my husband picked it up and read a page on his way to delivering it to me, he stated that it read like “a book written by a BYU professor.” This worried me. He didn’t mean it in a bad way, but I’ve had some bad experiences with fiction written by BYU professors.

Then I began to read it, and to my pleasure, I was immediately drawn in. Continue reading “On Sheldon Lawrence’s Hearts of the Fathers and Categories of Relgious Fiction (with a most inappropriate comparison)”

Mormon Easter Eggs and Mormon Veins of Goldin Pariah Missouri

As this post appears, you have less than one day to get into the Pariah Missouri Kickstarter, so open that in a new tab now, so’s you don’t forget.

You may recall that I’ve mentioned this comic before, but that was before I’d read it. Now I have and I’m ready to talk about its Mormon elements.

The first thing to know is that all I can discuss at present of the story’s first two volumes as the third and presumably final volume is the Kickstarter’s raison d’être. Therefore I will not be attempting any sort of Meaning of the Work as a Whole or analyzing its Mormon elements with that sort of goal in mind. Rather, my interest today is comparing the Mormon aspects of the two books available now. After all—that’s what the author challenged me to do!

(The author, Andres Salazar, sent me review copies gratis.) Continue reading “Mormon Easter Eggs and Mormon Veins of Goldin Pariah Missouri”

Notes Toward a Mormon Theology of the Word: A Working Response to Jack Harrell’s Writing Ourselves

My review essay on Jack Harrell’s recently released book, Writing Ourselves: Essays on Creativity, Craft, and Mormonism, went live on the AML website yesterday. Since Harrell seems to position the book as a conversation starter (but really, isn’t that what all books are for?), I used my response to converse with the way he explicitly and implicitly addresses what in the review I call “a Mormon theology of the Word” and to consider possible ways of elaborating that theology into something more robust that can inform discussions of what Mormonism has to offer theories of language use. My notes on the book participate in my perpetual explorations of that topic. I’m posting the first section of my review here and linking to the full text in hopes of opening a channel for continuing the conversation that Harrell carries on in Writing Ourselves and that I pick up in my essay.

So, if something strikes you, even if you haven’t yet read the book, please comment below.

Here’s my opening section:

Notes Toward a Mormon Theology of the Word: A Working Response to Jack Harrell’s Writing Ourselves

i.
“The universe,” writer Jack Harrell claims, “is fundamentally absurd.” By nature, he argues, it’s out of tune and tends toward chaos. Enter God, an eternal personage who, by virtue of habits of being developed during an aeons-long process of development, seeks to call chaos to order, to resolve the discordant system. By Harrell’s estimation this makes God the ultimate Sense-Maker, the Source of meaning in a place that doesn’t of itself make sense. Addressing Mormonism’s “Creator-God” in an essay titled “Making Meaning as a Mormon Writer,” which is included in Harrell’s recent essay collection, Writing Ourselves, Harrell asserts that “God enters that corner” of the universe where “perilous chaos” reigns “and creates something from the raw materials there. This is what God does; this is who he is.” Then Harrell distills his claims about God-as-Creative-Being to a five word statement: “God is literally logos, meaning.” Drawn from the figure of God presented in the Johannine Gospel—”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” where Word translates the Greek term Logos—Harrell’s portrayal casts deity as the Supreme Rational Being whose creative power emerges from the significance inscribed on his being. Which is to say that meaning is in his eternal DNA. By this line of reasoning, which undergirds the main ideas Harrell pursues in Writing Ourselves, without meaning and the processes by which meaning is made and propagated, God is naught and existence is absurd.

If God is meaning-embodied, to emulate God—as Mormons believe we’re made to do—is to privilege (above all things) meaning and the processes by which meaning is made and propagated. Harrell suggests that Mormon writers should take this work seriously, as a matter of devotion to craft and to Christ, who as the Logos is, in Harrell’s words, “language and reason itself, making communication and meaning possible.” His parallel clauses suggest that, for Harrell, language is the province of communication and reason the province of meaning. It follows from my latter statement that to make meaning as a Mormon writer I must reason as God reasons. I must look “at unorganized matter,” at the absurdity and chaos of existence, and envision ways of bringing such foolishness to order, of shaping something logical from things illogical. We do this work every time we tell stories. Whether we compose them in writing or aloud, whether we’re working writers or relating events to a friend, we have a tendency to seek meaning in and to impose meaning on the happenings, the flow, and the structure of our lives. We may take this tendency as a given aspect of our being, as a characteristic developed during premortal aeons spent in God’s presence then carried into mortality. But must this be the case? What if we aren’t born predisposed to seek or to make meaning but we grow into the tendency? What if in terms of being as such—especially on the scale of eternal existence—meaning-making and reason are corollaries to more vital work? What if making meaning isn’t God’s—and by extension our—only or even highest purpose?

Read the full review on the flipside of this link.

Taking Our Stories to a General Audience: A review of The Librarian Shoots a Gun, by Amber Gilchrist

Amber Gilchrist is an independent writer of fiction that is unapologetically LDS and aimed at a general audience. When I set into reading her newest novel, The Librarian Shoots a Gun, it was with the intent of studying how she grounds her general readers in LDS culture–what she feels a need to explain, and how she does it without interrupting the flow of her story. Continue reading “Taking Our Stories to a General Audience: A review of The Librarian Shoots a Gun, by Amber Gilchrist”

Zion, Utopias and being politically agnostic artists

Based on the evidence we have (the scriptures), it seems to me that it takes extraordinary social, political and economic conditions for a community of believers to form a Zion state. The city of Enoch required a separate city-state protected by a prophet who could work miracles to keep enemies at bay. The no-ites found in Fourth Nephi required a series of natural catastrophes which caused the deaths of thousands (and thus a major reduction of the population) and (presumably) disrupted existing economic and political structures, followed by a personal visit from the resurrected Christ, and the personal calling of Twelve Apostles in front of hundreds, perhaps, thousands of witnesses and all that even managed only two generations worth of Zion. The post-Millennium situation requires Jesus Christ himself to vanquish evil and rule personally (not to mention a fairly dramatic restructuring of the physical elements of the planet itself). Even the not fully successful attempts at establishing Zion, such as certain periods among the Nephites and/or Lamanites, the people of Israel, and the early Mormons required a fairly homogenous population forged out of much tribulation (and, generally, a prophet who was also the main political leader). And all of those periods were difficult, fragile, and short-lived.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about neo-liberalism and the way in which it erodes families, communities and individuals in the service of technocratic utopian visions, which while may be sincere and well-meaning on the part of some are undergirded by the demands of capital. I am by nature and experience a political pragmatist and radical centrist. Which means I find value in libertarian and Marxist and democratic socialist and crunchy conservative critiques of neo-liberalism (and of each other). But I also find myself frustrated by and/or deeply skeptical of the solutions proposed by each of those political philosophies.

So I think what I’ve arrived at is that all utopias–all ideal states that are not Zion–are flawed and something to be fought against. All political philosophies tend to have elements of them that are totalizing. That are willing to sacrifice humanity and human agency on the altar of the political philosophy.

Satan’s plan is not socialism. It’s not neo-liberalism. It’s not Marxism or libertarianism or anarchism. It’s any world view that attempts to totalize, that degrades, that dehumanizes–that can swerve into fascism on the way to utopia. Anything that loses patience with human agency and sacrifices human compassion on the altar of expediency and tries to smooth out the messiness of this physical existence through force or coercion or seduction.

While engagement in the democratic process is necessary, important and can lead to much good in the world. While engagement in the economic and cultural marketplace is necessary, important and can even lead to much good in the world. While we as Latter-day Saints are not called to the monastery, the compound, the commune, the enclave, I worry that we are too often too much in the world.

I think this is especially dangerous for artists. I’m not calling for solely apolotical art or artists to not engage in politics. Artists shouldn’t be willfully blind to the realities of the modern world. In fact, I think artists should be in dialogue with current political and socio-economic thought and action. I think artists should be angry, concerned, hopeful, curious, engaged and informed about the world. I don’t believe that art for art’s sake is actually possible or desirable.

But I also think that artists, and especially Mormon artists, should have at their core a deep skepticism of utopian solutions and an ultimately agnostic stance towards politics that prods them to interrogate the reifying language of politicians and technocrats even when (especially when!) they happen to lean towards a particular party platform and/or candidate. We should want to make the world a better place within the current social, economic and political constraints. In order to do so, we have to work with the ideas and people of our time. It’s just that Zion should be this pulsating hope inside us that repels other ideologies from burrowing all the way through to our inner core worldview and artistic themes and concerns.

Am I wrong about this?

Note: comments are welcome — this is not, however, an invitation to talk about politics in general or any one politician or party, and rather about artists positioning in relation to the discourse of politics.

Three Poems by Mormon Women to Joseph F. Smith, 1855-1857

My recent study on the correspondence of Ina Coolbrith and Joseph F. Smith introduced me to three poems Mormon women wrote to the future prophet while he was on his first mission to the Sandwich Islands (1854-1858). While each poem shares some common themes and sentiments, their quality, style, and content vary in interesting and revealing ways.

The poems come from members of Joseph F. Smith’s family. Eliza R. Snow, Smith’s aunt through her plural marriage to Joseph Smith, wrote the earliest of the poem:

Lines address’d to Elder

Joseph Smith, Missionary to the Sandwich Islands

By Eliza R. Snow.

Joseph, the Lord has blest you
To be in early youth,
A herald of salvation—
A messenger of Truth.

And yet, the load is heavy
For youthful nerves to bear,
Amid the hosts of trials
The sons of Zion share.

Continue reading “Three Poems by Mormon Women to Joseph F. Smith, 1855-1857”